The Advantages of Flash Storage

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1 FIVE REASONS YOU SHOULD BE THINKING FLASH

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3 Table of Contents INTRO: WHY FLASH? REASON 1: FLASH CAN HANDLE IT REASON 2: FLEXIBLE AND SCALABLE REASON 3: HIGH PERFORMANCE, LOW LATENCY REASON 4: LONG-TERM COST SAVINGS REASON 5: EASE OF USE THINKING FLASH? THINK XTREMIO WHY EMC & RED RIVER FOR FLASH?

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5 Introduction: Why Flash? Quick! What s the first thing that comes to mind when you think Flash? A. Super bright camera light that can turn the cutest family picture into a red-eyed nightmare. B. Classic sci-fi comic book hero with the last name of Gordon. C. The speed at which you ll move for your favorite snack. D. The low-cost, high-performance answer to all of your critical storage dilemmas. If you answered D right away, you re set. If you wavered, read on to learn exactly why your first thought should be Flash when you re thinking enterprise storage.

6 REASON 1: FLASH CAN HANDLE IT Tight IT budgets and ever increasing amounts of structured and unstructured data are putting a stranglehold on too many businesses and public sector agencies. With both IDC and EMC predicting that data storage volumes will grow 50 times by 2020, storage system demands will only increase. Aging legacy systems no longer fit for purpose exacerbate the situation by hampering performance and consuming already scarce resources. The fact is, new technologies such as cloud, virtualization and big data require better performance, resilience and efficiency. And, in order to grow, deliver services, meet mission requirements and stay competitive, business enterprises and government agencies of all sizes require more speed, capacity and responsiveness. Whatever the storage challenge Flash can handle it. Ideal for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), virtual server infrastructure, big data, analytics and mixed workload consolidation, Flash storage arrays provide predictable and balanced performance, always-on data reduction, thin provisioning, data protection, encryption and simple provisioning.

7 REASON 2: FLEXIBLE AND SCALABLE All-Flash storage is quickly transforming storage architecture and revolutionizing the enterprise data center. Why? All-Flash storage arrays are highly flexible and scalable to suit a wide variety of workloads, performance demands, IT department requirements and budgets. Easy to scale up or down to meet exacting requirements, Flash allows you to speed a single application, create a hybrid environment or supercharge your entire storage system. Flash addresses the need for quick access, enabling businesses to analyze more data, process more transactions, and accelerate applications and services in order to meet growing demands. At a highly competitive price to disk, all-flash storage is now a cost-effective option that delivers significant total cost of ownership savings by requiring significantly less space and power. Considering the increasing cost and short supply of both commodities, these are particularly significant factors in the modern data center environment.

8 REASON 3: HIGH PERFORMANCE, LOW LATENCY Today s all-flash storage arrays are designed for maximum performance and consistently low latency response times. Global always-on data reduction and thin provisioning further reduce capacity needs and minimize performance impact. environments for example, require high performance with highly randomized workloads for which an all-flash environment is perfect. Large databases that require high performance in order to achieve optimum results are another ideal example of where Flash can be put to good use. While any IT environment or application can benefit from an all-flash storage array, those that require high performance and low latency will reap the biggest improvements. Virtualized servers and virtual desktop

9 REASON 4: LONG-TERM COST SAVINGS Flash is now available at a much lower price per usable gigabyte that enterprises have been paying for disk arrays. Plus, there are long-term savings associated with all-flash arrays. Organizations can reduce their OPEX costs with Flash as it offers much more capacity than spinning disks, helping to cut the costs of sprawling racks of spinning disk storage that is increasingly expensive to power, cool and maintain. As Flash uses fewer servers to deliver more work, Flash also reduces software licensing costs along with the time IT professionals need to spend replacing disk drives. The speed of Flash also provides value by helping companies accelerate and capitalize on the value of their information. Faster applications make it easier to take advantage of big data to impact operations and drive decision-making. Business analytics is an increasingly important workload as organizations work to find the data patterns in extremely large, multi-terabyte datasets and transactional data stored in large data warehouses. Analytics workloads provide real-time analysis of credit-card

10 use, cellphone call patterns, and retail transactions to detect and stop criminal activity. Through its optimization of fast and efficient data processing, Flash storage supports this type of real-time data analytics, which reduce risk and protect valuable assets.

11 REASON 5: EASE OF USE Who has time to take on another complex IT task? No one. Today s all-flash storage arrays are designed with ease-of use in mind, meaning configuration is so simple that a system can be up and running quickly. to support additional performance and capacity needs, but also deliver additional performance to existing databases and applications seamlessly without the need to redeploy databases when requirements grow. With a simple user interface, provisioning, managing and maintaining storage is significantly minimized with Flash, so resources are free to focus on higher-priority projects and new initiatives. Scaleout designs not only make it easy

12 THINKING FLASH? THINK EMC XTREMIO Once you re thinking Flash, think EMC XtremIO. XtremIO is an all-flash storage array that has been designed from the ground up to unlock Flash s full performance potential and deliver array-based capabilities that leverage the unique characteristics of SSDs, based on Flash media. XtremIO uses industry standard components and proprietary intelligent software to deliver unparalleled levels of performance. Achievable performance ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPS, and consistent low latency of under one millisecond. The system is also designed to provide minimal planning, with a user-friendly interface that makes provisioning and managing the array very easy. XtremIO leverages Flash to deliver value across the following main dimensions: Performance Regardless of how busy the system is, and regardless of storage capacity utilization, latency and throughput remain consistently predictable and constant. Latency within the array for an I/O request is typically far less than one millisecond.

13 Scalability The XtremIO storage system is based on a scale-out architecture. The system begins with a single building block, called an X-Brick. When additional performance and capacity are required, the system scales out by adding X-Bricks. Performance scales linearly ensuring that two X-Bricks supply twice the IOPS, three X-Bricks supply three times the IOPS, and four bricks supply four times the IOPS of a single X-Brick configuration. Latency remains consistently low as the system scales out. Efficiency The core engine implements content-based Inline Data Reduction. The XtremIO storage array automatically reduces (deduplicates) data on the fly, as it enters the system. This reduces the amount of data written to Flash, improving longevity of the media and driving down cost. XtremIO arrays allocate capacity to volumes on-demand in granular 4KB chunks. Volumes are always thin-provisioned without any loss of performance, over-provisioning of capacity or fragmentation. Data Protection XtremIO leverages a proprietary Flash-optimized data protection algorithm (XtremIO Data Protection or XDP) which provides RAID-6 protection for data, while enabling performance that is superior to any existing RAID algorithms. Optimizations in SCP also result in fewer writes to Flash media for data protection purposes. Functionality XtremIO supports high performance and spaceefficient snapshots, Inline Data Reduction, thin provisioning and full VMware VAAI integration, as well as support for Fibre Channel and iscsi protocols.

14 WHY RED RIVER AND EMC FOR FLASH EMC delivers on the promises of Flash and offers a Flash-everywhere approach to meet the varying storage needs of today s businesses and public sector agencies. A longstanding EMC Partner, Red River has a forwardthinking storage practice and strong understanding of Flash. We know exactly what it takes to harness the power of Flash. Let Red River identify the right Flash storage options for your infrastructure and show you how to utilize Flash to capitalize on its lightning fast, always-on cost-saving capabilities. Contact us to learn more about Flash today.

15 ABOUT RED RIVER Red River is an IT hardware integrator committed to helping customers optimize business processes and maximize the value of IT investments. Widely regarded for our special focus on the U.S. government, Red River has developed a remarkable reputation for delivering IT products and hardware-related services to military and civilian agencies and the companies that serve them. Our core values of hard work and honesty fuel our central mission to make IT personal. Learn more at

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